Psychoanalysis: WTF? Sigmund Freud and the Oedipus Complex Explained | Tom Nicholas

this video is brought to you by skills share Todd Phillips is 2019 film joker continued a trajectory in comic book to big screen adaptations away from the campy high jinks of turn-of-the-century entries such as Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin or Sam Raimi's spider-man trilogy and towards a preference for a certain realism where Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy had already excised catchphrases and highly saturated color palettes and invited in an added layer of moral complexity Joker went further presenting us not with an origin --less enigmatic quick whipping Clown Prince of Crime but instead a disenfranchised working-class man whose horrific acts are the product of a mixture of mental ill-health and marginalization now it's worth saying upfront that the film's portrayal of the experience of mental ill-health has provoked considerable pushback from clinicians psychiatrist vassilis capers ice suggested to USA Today that the audience walks away associating the film's protagonist Arthur flex violent behavior particularly the gun violence with his mental illness it reinforces perceptions people might have which are way overblown indeed the film seems to swing between implying that people with mental illness diagnosis are an inherent danger to society and fetishizing mental health conditions as providing an escape from the grueling psychological impact of late capitalism whichever emphasis it is exacting any given moment the film's characterization of Arthur and its plot more broadly to a great deal upon rarefied perceptions of people experiencing mental ill-health in a manner which certainly warrants further discussion at the very least in today's video however we're going to be bracketing off some of those concerns while we're definitely gonna be digging into the psyche of yak green Phoenix's Joker I'm not gonna speculate over what mental illness the film wants us to believe that has instead I want to focus on Joker as a marginalized individual torn between a desire to fit in even to be celebrated for his comedy act and a social world which constantly denies him the ability to fulfill that desire I always want to foreground the characters experience of childhood trauma as well as the part that he plays in a mother child relationship which is a direct inversion of that which is generally viewed as the law one in which Arthur dutifully cares for a mother who has in the past not being so capable of reciprocating for taken together these themes make Joker a useful object of study for exploring a school of psychiatric thought which emerged at the turn of the 20th century known as psychoanalytic theory originated by the Swiss neurologist Sigmund Freud psychoanalytic theory and their clinical practice of psychoanalysis which takes that theory as its basis argues that although we might like to think of ourselves as being ultimately rational beings the Masters of our own minds we might not always have the upper hand in our own heads our conscious thoughts Freud argued coexist alongside other thoughts were often hardly even aware psychoanalysis argues that our mind holds on to primal urges and desires as well as traumas which we often like to assume that we've totally purged ourselves up and Freud suggested these thoughts regularly get the better of us slipping out into our dreams our jokes and our mannerisms in today's episode of what the theory then we're gonna be using Joker as a means to introduce and explore some of Freud's key ideas as well as to consider how they might be used not only in the analysis of the psyche of an individual but in the analysis of cultural texts such as films and society more broadly [Music] the central idea of psychoanalysis as developed by Sigmund Freud is that the conscious mind the part of our minds in which we engage in intentional thought is only one of three coexisting aspects of the human psyche in his 1899 book the interpretation of dreams Freud names these three aspects of the human mind the conscious mind the pre conscious mind and the unconscious mind the conscious mind refers to the part of our minds in which we engage in intentional thoughts the pre conscious mind by contrast refers to the portion of our mind in which we store information that we're not presently thinking about but which we could bring into our conscious mind to any given moment to use the analogy of a computer the conscious mind might be said to be similar to rat it's the part of our mind in which active thinking takes place the pre conscious mind might be thought of as similar to hard drive storage a vault of information that isn't presently being used but which we can access whenever circumstances require the unconscious mind is something altogether different it contains not information per se but feelings urges and desires and unlike the pre conscious mind we cannot intentionally access it it lies beyond the comprehension of deliberate thought to go back to the analogy of the computer it is as though the unconscious mind is somehow encrypted depriving us of the ability to intentionally contemplate the desires urges and traumas which lurk within though we might not be able to consciously access them however this does not mean that the repressed impulses which lie within our unconscious are inert Freud argued that they regularly assert themselves unbeknownst to us they greatly inform our behavior and our epistemological relationship with the world around us indeed there are regular moments when one's unconscious seizes the opportunity to leap out and take control of our thoughts and actions Freud presented a number of examples of the unconscious leaking out in this way the so-called Freudian slip such as the school child who accidentally refers to their teacher as mum or dad was one such example here Freud might have argued the school child's unconscious has momentarily seized control and revealed something about how that pupil conceives of their relationship with their teacher in their unconscious mind Freud also suggested that the jokes we tell can reveal something about this elusive part of our psyche he put the greatest emphasis however on dreams when asleep he suggested that our unconscious minds cede control somewhat and that our unconscious is thus able to take over that's not to say that the contents of our dreams are entirely lucid revelations of our unconscious desires as the title is book suggests they still require interpretation nevertheless dreams were to Freud the Royal Road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind now we never see Arthur FLAC asleep during Joker there are no moment in which we soft fade from him tossing and turning in bed into the contents of his sleeping mind he does however regularly daydream there is a moment early in the film for instance when Arthur is watching the fictional late-night talk show live with Murray Franklin and whilst doing so he envisages himself there in the live studio audience being called out onto the stage and being celebrated by the show's hosts played by Robert De Niro for his commitment to caring for his mother and it is tempting to interpret this daydream on its own terms and to suggest that Arthur's desire here is simply to appear as a guest on Murray Franklin's show a desire that is sated by the end of the film yeah as I've mentioned Freud argued that dreams can rarely be read this simply in order to come to a slightly more Freudian interpretation about this talk-show dream then it is necessary to first dig into some of frauds ideas surrounding our relationships with our immediate family before we get on to either post complexes super egos and each however I want to take a moment to tell you about today's video sponsor Skillshare Skillshare is an online learning community for lifelong learners like yourself they have thousands of awesome classes aimed at helping you build your creative skills i'm currently loving ruminal am series on creative writing for all which is really helping me to rethink how i write the script to these videos not only of romance videos helped me to think about stuff like structure and word choice but also how to be more critical when I'm reading other people's work so that I can draw on what I found engaging in what I'm currently reading into my own writing but whether you're things writing filmmaking graphic design or whatever else skills share has a course for you and an annual subscription comes to just $10 a month to top things off the first 1000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get a two month free trial of Premium Membership so that you can explore your creativity now back to your regularly scheduled content see froy is obsessed by our relationships with our parents well we might now think of psychoanalytic theory as a purely philosophical approach to discussing mental states not scientifically accurate but a useful framework for discussion it's important to recognize that Freud very much approached it as a science and as part of this he was not only interested in how our minds function as we are adults but also how they developed during childhood in doing so he argued that the experiences of our early lives have a huge impact on the formation of our psyche as daniel picah explains Freud argued that adults are often left struggling with fears and fantasies they were supposed to have left behind in childhood some of Freud's most famous ideas surrounding this matter concern our relationships with our mothers and our fathers in a 1910 paper entitled a special type of choice of object made by men Freud coined the term Oedipus complex to refer to the unconscious psychosexual relationship which he considered all boys to have with their mothers in doing so he drew upon Sophocles play eda puss Rex in which the king and queen of Thebes on learning of a prophecy that their newborn child would murder his father and marry his mother abandons him to die on a mountaintop Oedipus the child however survives and to cut a long story short he eventually winds up for filling the prophecy by killing his father and marrying his mother Freud roped his friend Wilhelm fleece that the Greek myth seizes on a compulsion that everyone recognizes because he has felt traces of it in himself every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and this dream fulfillment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his present state in short he suggested that all sons have within their unconscious a desire to fulfill the prophecy of Oedipus somewhere in their unconscious lies a psychosexual desire for their mother and a hatred of their father in Freud's very heteronormative and patriarchal conception of parenting he drew focus to the manner in which in their early lives the son of a heterosexual couple often has the almost sole attention of their mother as they grow older however they learn that they are not in fact their mother's entire world but then the mother has a life of their own and relationships to others and Freud argued learning that one is not the sole object of one's mother's attention is inherently traumatic it can feel like a betrayal and given that the earliest of their mothers other relationships that the son of a heterosexual couple is likely to become aware of is that between their mother and their father the father thus comes to be representative of the world tearing away of one's mother from them now there's much to be said about Freud's complete focus on boys to the exclusion of all others and his assumption of a heterosexual relationship in which both MA and father are present with the child and in which the mother takes on the role of the primary carer subsequent psychoanalytic scholars including Carl Jung and Luce Irigaray have sought to consider what the correlative experience might be for girls for today however let's contain our focus to Freud and consider how we might be able to apply the notion of the Oedipus complex to Joker for a key element the plot of Joker is that Arthur's father isn't around Arthur lives and has done all his life solely with his mother if Arthur were one of Freud's patients he would likely have much to say about this the caring role that Arthur plays for his mother is perceived by others within the film as strange as a relationship which is overly close in fact if as Freud argued dreams are the Royal Roads to knowledge then the audience is laughed when he tells us Murray Franklin that he still lives with his mother in the aforementioned daydream is perhaps indicative that Arthur knows in his unconscious mind that this situation is viewed as odd by others and this daydream is again insightful here for through the theory of development offered to us by Freud we might argue that the absence of a father figure to compromise the relationship between Arthur and his mother is a key element in his struggle to fit in to the world around Ford few things within psychoanalysis are literal and this extends to Freud's understanding of our relationships with our mothers and fathers whilst developing his concept of the Oedipus complex Freud wrote in a latter also to his good friend Fleiss that the father forbids the child from realizing his unconscious wish to sleep with his mother in this way the father figure comes to represent the law authority and other forms of social norm we're in their early relationship with their mother Freud's typical son believes themselves to have the complete undeveloped on this the father begins a process by which that son is inculcated into the rules of the around them while the father might sever to some extent the child's relationship with their mother the father introduces them and is thus representative of the legal and moral framework of the society around the child while many of us might squirm at the implication in Freud's thinking here that to be the child of a single mother inherently leads to problems later in life for the purposes of providing an introduction to it we're going to attempt to remain sympathetic to Freud's work and in the case of Joker which similarly channels some problematic tropes surrounding single mothers and the children of absent fathers there do seem to be some commonalities for from the very earliest moments of Joker Arthur clearly struggles to comprehend the rules of the world around him and this extends far beyond what the film clearly wants us to consider his overly close relationship with his mother we see him at one point for instance attempting to note down the rules of stand-up comedy through watching other comics perform he attempts to construct a formula for making people laugh predictably this fail was to improve his craft as a comedian through a psychoanalytic lens we might argue then that not only does Arthur lack an understanding of the rules of the world around him but he also lacks an understanding of the role that would always play in our lives he fails to see that what we do often choose to adhere to the norms of the world around us at other times for the sake of comedy say we are required to break or to bend them and this brings us back to our Thursday dreams of appearing on live with Murray Franklin for again from a psychoanalytic point of view one might argue that this is a prime example of Arthur's unconscious drama surrounding not having a father figure in his life breaking through we might interpret this dream as being less about actually appearing on live with Murray Franklin and more about the desire for a father figure Murray's behavior towards Arthur in this daydream certainly has an element of far the leanest Murray thanks Arthur for looking after his mother and displays a degree of pride towards him furthermore throughout the film Murray is one of the sole sources of a coherent moral framework the film's climax Murray tells him to avoid swearing on screen and when things turn tense in his interview with Arthur now Joker he castigates him for what he views as an insensitive amoral even sense of humour Arthur's search for a father figure obviously comes to be a central element to the plot in act two when he learns that his mother believes that he is the son of Thomas Wayne this comes to a painful resolution when Arthur first finds out the Wayne is far from the upstanding compassionate individual his mother has told him of and then finds out the Wayne is not his father at all it's no surprise then that the film ultimately resolved with Arthur sat next to Murray the only person who has ever attempted to provide him with some kind of knowledge of the rules of the world around him and who thus in the Freudian understanding of the human mind has more successfully fulfilled the father's role so we've so far discussed psychoanalytic theory and Joker with reference to what Freud referred to as his topographical model of the human mind this view of the human psyche has comprised of the preconscious conscious and unconscious Minds focuses primarily on how we store or both factual and emotional information Freud later developed this model however to revolve less around the store of information and more around processes and personality in his 1923 book the ego and the heed Freud suggested that the human personality contains within it three warring aspects the super-ego the ego and the eat now there are some consistencies between Freud's two models the super-ego can be said to have some relationship to the pre conscious mind the ego to the conscious mind and the heed to the unconscious mind the key distinction is that where the former model portrayed these as sort of zones in which information is stored this personality model reimagines them more clearly as active forces influencing our thoughts and behavior following the conclusion of one's either post complex Freud writes that the super-ego retains the character of the father the super-ego that refers to the aspect of our personality which seeks to adhere to the legal and moral framework of the society around us almost directly opposed to this is the heed which Freud argued is the first part of our personality to develop and is opposed primal in its priorities the heed seeks to push us towards pursuing our most basic instinctive urges mediating between what we might see as two extremes here is the ego if the super-ego prioritizes high-minded ideals such as legality and morality and the heed primal urges for food or sexual gratification the ego is the aspect of our personality most interested in how these relate to reality the ego understands that we occasionally have to adjust our morals to a given situation and that we occasionally do have to break the rules for certain reasons the ego also understands that we can't simply follow our instinctual urges every waking second Freud once wrote of the ego that in its relationship to the heed it is like a man on horseback who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse it is in some respects then the mediator between the two warring factions of the super-ego and the eid which attempts to keep both in check to return to a former filmic visit to Gotham City Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight presents us with a beautiful analogy for the relationship between the super-ego the ego and the eat the latter aspect of Freud's conception of the human psyche is represented here by Heath Ledger's Joker the Joker in this iteration of the Batman story is driven by a base urge for destruction he might be the villain of the film but there is no grand master plan here simply a desire to as Alfred puts it watch the world burn the super-ego is represented by Harvey Dent the district attorney frequently referred to as Gotham's White Knight his campaign against organized crime seeks to uphold law and order and bring morality back to Gotham between these two figures sits Batman Batman shares a similar goal to dent but recognizes that ridding Gotham City of crime occasionally requires adjusting his moral framework and rendering a bad guy or two unconscious yeah although he might occasionally channel this heed like behavior he is also clearly opposed to the chaotic project of the Joker and only engages these baser instincts in pursuit of a morally just end welcome back to how we might be able to apply a similar framework to Joker as a whole shortly for now let's continue discussing the character of Arthur flack as an individual for throughout the film we see Arthur wrestling with all three aspects of his psyche his heed as one would imagine of a character who throughout his previous iterations has always saw chaos is a strong presence some of the influences of Arthur's heed we have already discussed the childlike comfort he finds in his relationship with his mother for instance or his unconscious desire for a father thing as the film proceeds Arthur embraces his heed to an ever greater extent after he murders a Wall Street trader in self-defense he seemingly gets a taste for blood and for revenge first he murders the traders friends and then later he let his heed take over once again when he exact his revenge upon his co-worker Randall who was a key contributor to Arthur getting fired from his job by the end of the film Arthur has seemingly succumbed entirely to the will of his heed as whilst disavowing the politics of the killed the rich movement that has risen up on the streets of Gotham City he reveled in the cash it is unleashed it is worth noting however that it is not as if Arthur suddenly relent to these base instincts and desires in fact up to and including the murder of the first Wall Street trader Arthur's super-ego the parvis psyche which prioritizes high-minded ideals such as morality still holds considerable sway I've already discussed the manner in which we might read Murray Franklin as a kind of stand-in for a father within arthur's mind yet Arthur finds other father figures throughout the film the clearest is Thomas Wayne who for a time at least he believes to be his biological father Randall too however also plays a father-like role to Arthur he refers to Arthur as my boy and when Randall first gives Arthur the gun there is an extent to which he is actually trying to help him it is not only a gun that Randall gives Arthur them as Freud argued was the role of the father figure the gift of a gun is also symbolic of the gift of a moral framework it is a very different moral framework to that which Murray Franklin subscribes Randall is implicitly suggesting here that it is okay to shoot someone in self-defense yet it is a moral framework nonetheless as he swings between different replacements for his absent father then Arthur's super-ego also swings between different moral understandings of the world between Arthur's heed keen to exact revenge for his social marginalization and his confused super-ego reaching for a moral framework through which to engage with the world is Arthur's ego which just wants to fit in and get on with life we've had to see this most clearly in his sessions with his social worker and in his journal at one point Arthur writes that the worst part about having a mental illness is that people expect you to behave as if you don't tragically bartha's ego drives him towards trying to act as though he is a mental good health and toward attempting to fit in despite the weakness of his act perhaps it is when he is attempting to do comedy that his ego is most in control for comedy often thrives by engaging both the base instincts of our heed and our super-ego sense of morality so far in this video we've taken a similar approach to Joker as to that which Freud might taken in his clinic we focused in on the character of arthur flack and interpreted his dreams and what we know about his familial circumstances in order to speculate over the conclusions that a clinical cyclist might come to about his mental state Joker however is not only a study of the psyche of one individual in its foregrounding of issues of inequality and social marginalization it also aims at some level of societal and political critique psychoanalytic theory can also be of some use to us in interpreting this dimension of the film 2/4 from Freud onwards psychoanalytic theorists have sought not only to interpret the psyche of individuals but also that of society at large this is something we'll focus on more in a future video in which we look at the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who countered a Freud's view of psychoanalysis as a science develops a more philosophical approach one way in which psychoanalytic philosophers have sought to use Freud's insights and those which have been developed since to interpret the psyche of society more broadly is through the analysis of film this is most evident in the work of slobozia Scheck who regularly seeks to tease out two psychoanalytic understanding of life under Lake capitalism with references to the films that SIA T produces Todd McGowan explains the rationale behind using film as an insight into the society around it with reference to Freud's the interpretation of dreams writing that psychoanalysis makes its most important discoveries through the analysis of dreams and to this day the cinema remains a Dream Factory a form of public dreaming in this way scholars such as jiseok have sorted used the public dreams as an insight into the public psyche let's close out this video then by considering what Joker might reveal about our collective desires and anxieties at the end of the second decade of the 21st century earlier I discussed the manner in which the Dark Knight might be viewed in relation to Freud's model of personality I suggested that we might view Heath Ledger's Joker as the heed Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent as the super-ego and Christian Bale's Batman as the eeo Joker in the fatherly figure of Murray Franklin has its own super-ego who foreground morality and common understandings of what is and is not acceptable it also has an heed in the form one might argue of Arthur's mother who is obsessed with the idea of reconnecting with the man she miss remembers to have been her former lover and later in Arthur or Joker himself there is no Batman in Joker however Bruce Wayne is still a child with his journey to becoming the Batman still decades ahead in fact he doesn't utter a single line throughout the film although as I've discussed Arthur's ego does make some attempt to assert itself toward to the beginning of the film as the prop recedes this kind of influence is increasingly absent and this holds true not only for Arthur but for the film as a whole Joker thus presents us with a vision of the world in which the mediating force of the ego is increasingly absent the base urges of the heed and the overly moralistic thinking of the super-ego are thus able to burst out unfettered as often in film this is best observed not in any of the main characters but in those which populate the background of its scenes for the kill the rich movement which emerges throughout Joker brings together these two aspects of the personality its heed like behaviors are readily apparent in the wanton destruction it brings to the streets of Gotham yea these riots are also a moral reaction to a world that those participating see is increasingly on so to conclude there is much to be critiqued in Joker's representation of mental ill-health it adheres to a rarefied perception of those with mental illness diagnosis has in some way inherently prone to violence which is simply untrue psychoanalysis too has its problems Pulse alcove skis professor of clinical psychology and Applied Science at the University of Bath wrote in a 2011 issue of the British Medical Journal that psychoanalysis has no place in modern mental health services not only is there no evidence base for the treatment but there is no empirical grounding for the key constructs underpinning it there are it must be said some studies which show that psychoanalysis can be of benefit to patients yet this in no way serves to prove that any approach theses about the human psyche are correct in the scientific sense i have also pointed to some of the assumptions that psychoanalytic theory as developed by freud makes about familiar situations and its prioritization of the experience of boys and men above all others subsequent scholars have sought to amend some of Royds concepts often from a decidedly feminist perspective some of these developments I hope to cover in future videos psychoanalytic theory however remains a useful basis for considering the relationship between our intentional thought our baser urges and the legal and moral frameworks of the world around us it is ultimately a philosophy of desire it reminds us that understanding the world cannot solely be achieved through analyzing institutions and the societal forces they set in motion but also the desiring subjects which populate it thank you so much for watching this video if you found it useful or interesting in some way then do please consider sharing with a friend thanks as always to Ashe to Jeffries a cartwright to Michael B Brown to sentry Nielsen to army of me and Takei allow for being signed up to the top tier of my patreon if you would like to join them in supporting what I do here whilst getting early access to videos and copies of the scripts to them then you can do so by having to patreon.com/crashcourse yeah thank you so much once again for watching and have a great week

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Rating: 4.9050736 out of 5

Keywords: joker, joker 2019, freud, psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic, psychoanalytic theory, sigmund freud, Jacques lacan, lacan, Joaquin Phoenix, todd phillips, Robert de Niro, batman, Christopher Nolan, dark knight, the joker, joker Joaquin Phoenix, Joaquin Phoenix joker, video essay, joker video essay, comics, comic books, adaptation, dc, dccu, super-ego, superego, ego superego id, id freud, Oedipus complex, oedipus, psychology, psychiatry, zizek, slavoj zizek, what the theory, tom nicholas, wtf?

Id: wzvYjKgbFzw

Length: 32min 50sec (1970 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020